Bichette waits on deck despite spring heat wave
DUNEDIN, FLA.— Bo-bop-a-lula. Sorry. Just got that old rock chestnut in my head. Bo Bichette has certainly put the bop in spring training. Four round-trippers through 25 at-bats — tied with Anthony Alford for the team lead — and hitting a chunky .400.
A brace of jacks in Sunday’s 10-1 over the Twins, opening the game with a monster shot that cleared the stadium and leading off the sixth with a clone the other way, for a 3-for-5 afternoon at the plate. That long-ball quartet left him one behind Grapefruit League leader Lewis Brinson of the Marlins.
The 20-year-old shortstop, No. 2 prospect in the Blue Jays organization as per MLB Pipeline — No. 11 throughout baseball — is certainly giving club brass something to ponder. Bichette, not Vladimir Guerrero Jr., has emerged as the chrysalis star in Florida, cracking out of his cocoon.
Not that his flashiness here will make any difference in the projected timeline. Bichette will likely start 2019 at Triple-A Buffalo, an upward stride from New Hampshire for the son of a fourtime all-star.
Although Dante Bichette would have preferred that his boy make a career for
himself in tennis, a sport where Bo also excelled, playing elite youth tournaments before going all-in with a bat and glove. “I always wanted to be a baseball player,” says Bo. “He wanted me to play tennis.”
Dante, the former slugging outfielder, didn’t groom his son for baseball from the moment infant Bo came squalling into the world. “I definitely had a choice.” Now he limits his tennis to recreational matches with his dad at the family home 45 minutes away from here in St. Petersburg. “Rafael Nadal is my favourite athlete in the world. Just the way he competes, works, he’s so humble. Everything about him, I admire. The sheer competitiveness and desire, I just love watching him.”
The baseball genes predominated, however. Bichette has spent his entire life around the game, inside clubhouses, even skipping his freshman year of high school (he was homeschooled), spending the bulk of 2013 in Denver where his father was hitting coach that season with the Rockies. “He was 15 and the big-league guys always wanted him to hit during BP with them,” Dante Bichette recalled a couple of years ago. “They’d always pull him out there and he loved it. He would crash balls in the upper tank in most of the parks.”
Just a perk of being Dante’s kid, but the experience helped lay down a developmental foundation. And the roar of a big-league crowd filled his ears. Rubbing shoulders, too, with the likes of Troy Tulowitzki. “Just learning from some really good players on that team,” he has said. “How they went about the game and understand what it takes to be a big-league player. I think it gave me an edge.”
That edge has been honed across three seasons in the Jays organization, much of it spent in lockstep with Guerrero, although they were unyoked midway through 2018, when the latter was elevated to the Bisons. As a Fisher Cat, Bichette concluded the season with a slash line of .286/.343./ .455 and 11 home runs. Somewhat off his .328 average in 263 pro games in the minor-league ranks because there were stretches where Bichette struggled.
While Bichette and Guerrero are routinely mentioned in the same breath and presumed to have been best buddies, they don’t really have much in common beyond all-star paternal antecedents and towering ambitions. They’re friendly colleagues, not BFFs.
Bichette has overshadowed the endlessly scrutinized Guerrero under a Florida sun, at their first big-league camp. The relative inconspicuousness he’s enjoyed will doubtless vanish now that Guerrero has been sidelined for an estimated three weeks with a strained oblique.
Swing the klieg light over here.
“I don’t know if it’s helped, being out of the spotlight,” Bichette muses. “But I definitely don’t mind it. I’m pretty quiet and reserved myself. The less I have to do is probably better for me.” He means media stuff. “I’m happy for Vlad, happy for what he’s doing. I’m just kind of along for the ride right now and just worrying about myself.
“I don’t think I’ll mind too much if he always gets the praise.”
Not always and certainly exclusively. Certainly Bichette has impressed the heck out of manager Charlie Montoyo, the coaching staff and teammates.
On the defensive side, he’s been minding Freddy Galvis, who will be Toronto’s shortstop — a job that was to be shared with Lourdes Gurriel Jr., who started 46 games there in 2018 but has been shunted to second while Devon Travis deals with knee inflammation. “It’s not hurting me, for sure, to have Freddy around,” Bichette says. “He’s an incredible defender. I’m learning a lot from him every day, just about preparation, how to approach certain balls.”
But the primary focus this spring has been on reducing his strikeouts. At Double-A, Bichette had 101 whiffs, for a 17 per cent strikeout rate, in a league where the average was 21.31. Has winnowed the Ks down to a mere half-dozen at this camp. “Still too much, but it’s early so that’s bound to happen.” Eye-popping homers notwithstanding, he’s prioritizing contact over power. “I’ve tried to quiet my swing down a little bit, especially with two strikes. It allows me to see the ball longer, make better decisions, see the breaking ball better.”
That “quiet” in his swing Bichette attributes to altering his approach with two strikes — dropping the patent leg kick, instead gently lifting the leg and planting the front foot, which allows an extra nanosecond to see the ball while still distributing the load similarly. “I don’t like kick.”
It’s a tactic his dad instilled when Bichette was a young teen. “He’s always teaching me stuff. But since I was 13 or 14, he decided to let me run with whatever made sense to me. So, that’s one of the things I ran with, the two-strike approach.”
In Toronto’s youth-oriented rebuild, the consensus view is that Bichette needs another full year in the minors. He’s intent on persuading them otherwise.
“I think I’m ready to play there right now, in the big leagues. There’s definitely a ton more to learn and hopefully I’ll be learning till the day I retire. There’s never a limit to learning, for me.
“But I definitely feel like I’m ready now.”